Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who carried young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
